EINSTEIN: His Life and Universe
Walter Isaacson
Simon & Schuster
Biography
ISBN-10: 0743264738
ISBN-13: 9780743264730

If you can explain Einstein's theory of relativity clearly in a paragraph or two, then you probably don't need to read this book. But for the other 99.99 percent of the human race, it will doubtless prove vastly enlightening.

Walter Isaacson, a seasoned writer editor and media executive, tells the story of Einstein's life in colorful detail and makes a valiant effort to explain his work in theoretical physics along the way.

The life is engagingly told. It brings the man Einstein to vivid life. The explanation of his scientific and cosmological theories is necessarily denser and far less easy for the lay reader to fathom. (Full disclosure: Your reviewer had a tough time indeed with high school algebra and trigonometry, passing both largely due to the kindness of teachers.)

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany in 1879 and died world-famous in New Jersey in 1955. He fled Germany ahead of the Nazi takeover and lived the last third of his life in the United States. For all his fame, he was a kindly and self-deprecating man, the very model of the absent-minded professor who forgot his way home from work while lost in thought about the mysteries of the cosmos. Isaacson's research also shows that Einstein, whose personal life had troubles aplenty, remained a witty fellow, always ready with a quip or a clever turn of phrase as the occasion demanded.

His personal troubles began with his fathering a child out of wedlock as a young man; they continued through divorce, threats and persecution by the nascent Nazi movement, squabbles with fellow scientists, accusations of Communist leanings from American ultra-rightists and the FBI, unhappy relations with his two sons and general public incomprehension of what his theories meant and why they were important. Yet, through it all, he remained basically optimistic, viewing the world with a kind of amused sardonic detachment, calmly scribbling away at his equations and tilting at enough windmills to keep a squadron of Don Quixotes busy. He started out as a strict pacifist, only abandoning that stance when he saw the menace of Naziism up close. He became a passionate Zionist and a firm believer in the evils of nationalism and the need for world government.

There is a fascinating chapter on his religious beliefs, which found God as a kind of abstract force behind the beautiful orderliness he saw in the cosmos, but absolutely not as a personal deity who intervened in earthly affairs. He summed himself up with typical flippancy as "a deeply religious nonbeliever."

He saw his most important quality as curiosity --- always questioning the obvious, sassing back at authority, prizing creativity and imagination above mere rote learning and tangling gleefully with fellow scientists over their conflicting theories. When he became famous with the publication of his great theory of relativity in 1905, he wore his sudden celebrity lightly, joking that God had punished his disdain for authority by "making me an authority myself."

Isaacson has dug deeply into the Einstein literature, including a cache of papers made available only recently. His writing in the biographical area is breezily readable.

The author's acknowledgments show that he enlisted a phalanx of scientists and mathematicians to help him explain Einstein's theories, but it must be said that the results here will be unsatisfactory to all but physicists and cosmologists. Einstein himself had trouble explaining his thought to laymen, so give Isaacson high marks for trying and just get through those daunting pages as best you can. A few general ideas do loom up through the fog: Einstein's long feud with quantum mechanics theorists and his ultimately fruitless quest to expand general relativity into a "unified field theory," a sort of Theory of Everything that would unlock the secrets of the universe once and for all.

Albert Einstein comes across in Isaacson's pages as a lovable chap, a committed Jew who seldom went to synagogue, a man whose love of music led him to contrive "mathematical melodies," a Nobel Prize winner who seldom bothered to wear socks, and a man on a mission to save the world and explain infinity, but who sometimes forgot to eat lunch. He had a great brain but also a great heart.

   --- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)

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